An automaker's cheapest, smallest car will tell you how serious the company is about quality. Sure the expensive sedans look great, but how about lower down the line? Are they sweating the details on a sub-$20,000 compact?

Cars outsold the top-selling Ford F-series truck in May for the first time since 1992, a sign of the rapid shift in customers' preferences from trucks and SUVs to small cars that is forcing painful production cuts and plant closures at General Motors and Ford Motor.

Car companies are preparing a new wave of 40-plus miles-per-gallon subcompact cars just as high gasoline prices and fuel shortages have made U.S. motorists acutely interested in those vehicles. PHOTO GALLERY.

Car buyers fret over purchase price, interest rates, fuel economy and reliability data, looking for cars and trucks they can afford not only to buy, but also to keep. What they often overlook is the biggest by far expense of car ownership: depreciation.

GM plans to put at least three splashy auto-show cars into production, dropping the automaker into the middle of hotly competitive niche markets it has avoided. For consumers, it should mean lower prices and better selections among affordable sports cars and distinctive retro-style vehicles.

Mapmakers of yore would sketch the known world and account for unexplored areas by writing, "Here be dragons." Dragons, indeed, lurk in the unknown regions for automakers gambling prestige and profits this year on unusual models, untried ideas.